Son[i]a

The slovak musician, sound artist, and maker Jonáš Gruska is a proud amateur, honouring the French origin of the term (to love what you do). Curiosity and passion run through pretty much everything that Gruska engages in. In our conversation ranging from his site-specific sound installations to his hand-crafted microphones and audio tools, his recent interest in mycology, and his playful exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum, Jonáš used the word 'fascination' quite a lot. We talk to Jonáš about resonating spaces, resonating surfaces, tramways, self-taught electronic circuitry, field recordings, fermentation, mushrooms, and unusual microphones.

In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.

Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself – the context and paratext. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning.

For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”. In this ensemble podcast, we talk with them about these ten years of "extitution"

Political geographer and sound artist Anja Kanngieser works in the coordinates between space and sound. This merging of disciplines that seems completely normal to her tends to be more perplexing to the compartmentalised world of science and academia than to the undisciplined field of artistic practice. In this podcast, we become the listeners as Anja Kanngieser reflects on expanded listening, on the inaudible, and on our anthropocentrism. They talk about their long-standing interest in sound governance and dissect the many tensions that built up in the project “Climates of Listening”, which was originally based on the intention of amplifying campaigns for self-determination and self-representation in the Pacific.

Through a combination of artistic research, detective work, and an almost forensic approach to our own data trail, Joana Moll’s work exposes some of the most pressing issues of our data-driven, data-centric existence. Her research projects, talks, workshops and art pieces slip through the cracks of corporate behemoths to make sense of their polymorphic nature and reveal some of the hidden layers that shape and sustain the hypercapitalist fractal. In this podcast, we talk to Joana Moll about interfaces and their social implications, about technocolonialism, agency, surveillance, exploitation, speculation and, why not, about laughter.

The work of the sound artist Lars Holdhus, aka TCF, interrogates our relation to the technological infrastructures that permeate contemporaneity through language, code, cryptography and, most recently, ecology.  En este podcast, Lars aboga por la presencia y la conciencia. Between tea sips, he reflects on toolmaking and impact, A.I. and the obsession with flesh, human time and machine time. He also points out how boring technology becomes when you are 70% Buddhist, while introducing us to his latest projects: a virtual touring software teasing the limits of the live music industry and a random processing tool that he feeds and confronts to compose and create images.

Alma Söderberg is a choreographer and performer who works with music and dance. As well as exploring close listening, Alma listens to rhythm and movement, in order to inhabit polyrythm and "simultaneous difference", to quote Eric Davis by way of Alma. In this podcast, Alma tells us about the many musical influences that inspire her choreographic practice: jazz, flamenco, hip hop, and experimental and Afro-American music. She also talks about multiplicity, reduced listening and deep listening, about letting rhythm run through you, about the voice, sharing, idiorhythms, Anni Albers, weaving, learning to wait, and about playing.

To the Argentinian trumpeter, percussionist, songwriter, and producer Tatiana Heuman, the world is a dance floor and and sound comes into being through close bodily combat involving intuition, movement, and hurdles. Thus, a paradox arises in the recording process, when spontaneity and corporality are reduced to mere beats on a timeline. In this podcast, Tatiana Heuman talks about music that runs through the body, about the intersections between dance and percussion, about sounds that move, about deconstructed folklore and babbling, about formal and informal teaching, about addition and subtraction, about names that don’t mean anything, and about the experiences of women who play and lug around drum kits. 

Finnish artist Terike Haapoja invites us to imagine this posthumanism: a hybrid, expansive, empathetic “we” with room for ambiguity and difference and for interspecies political understanding, in which the morbid fantasy of human exceptionalism and the hierarchy of species is put to rest once and for all. Drawing on concepts such as Syl Ko’s black veganism, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s expanded theory of animal rights, and Carol J. Adams’ sexual politics of meat, Terike Haapoja ventures to imagine a world beyond animalisation and distinctions between protected and disposable beings.